A Jennifer Coolidge acting masterclass leads a sexually-crazed episode of The White Lotus as the miniseries really kicks into gear.The 59-year-old veteran actress is garnering 2022 Emmys buzz for her role as wealthy woman Tanya McQuoid, who is mourning the death of her mother as she ventures on holiday to Maui to scatter her ashes.And it’s easy to see why her performance is being praised after the latest episode of Mike White’s satire, which is now streaming on Foxtel, featuring a dramatic and emotional boat scene that could well win the US star her first Emmy award.But first, we open with Armond (Murray Bartlett) representing Monday morning.The hotel manager popped a Xanax pill the night before and is clearly on the brink of falling off the rails after breaking five years of hard-earned sobriety.Amid a growing beef with the hotel’s most privileged guest Shane Patton (Jake Lacy), Armond is determined to make the rest of Shane’s holiday a living hell.Tanya arranges a private charter at sunset to scatter her mother’s ashes, and when Shane wants to treat his new bride Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) to a romantic dinner, Armond seizes the opportunity to sneakily tack them onto Tanya’s boat, knowing full well it’ll be a sh*tshow.As Shane and Rachel arrive on the boat, they are unexpectedly greeted by Tanya who thinks the two strangers have come to join her in mourning.Stream The White Lotus on Foxtel. New customers get a 10-day free trial. Sign up at foxtel.com.au“These are my mother’s ashes. I don’t want to be a downer. She would’ve wanted us to have a good time,” Tanya tells the bewildered Pattons.She then begins her heartfelt eulogy.“My mother tried really hard to be a good mother even though she didn’t have any maternal instincts or skills,” Tanya opens.“I’d walk into her room and find all sorts of strange men in her bed. She had borderline personality disorder.“She took her money and manipulated people with it. And she was cruel. Very very cruel“Oh mother mother mother mother … My mother told me I would never be a ballerina, and that was when I was skinny.“She couldn’t handle her jealousy. She had to take me down.”As we said, heartfelt.Tanya then asks Shane to open the box her ashes mothers are in, before grabbing a handful and hurling it out into the ocean, as dust particles fly onto the Patton’s faces.Tanya starts wailing aggressively as she realises it’s “too soon” for her to let go of the ashes before hurriedly closing the box and having an almighty breakdown.Coolidge’s performance is phenomenal and shows how much we’ve underestimated her acting chops during her 30-year career.Elsewhere at The White Lotus resort, Mark Mossbacher (Steve Zahn) is grappling with news he received in the previous episode that his father died of AIDS, not cancer.RELATED: Sydney Sweeney details extreme role prep for The White LotusHaving a heart-to-heart with his teen son Quinn (Fred Hechinger) in the hotel pool, Mark realises: “What’s real? What’s real is … gay, straight, whatever, we’re just monkeys,” he says.“We’re just f**king monkeys. We’re just animals. We wanna be like superheroes and respectable fathers but in fact we’re just monkeys living in our little monkey pods, driven by base instincts to create these hierarchies and hump each other.”A drunken Mark later runs into Armond at the bar, where Armond is smashing whiskey neat. Mark asks Armond, a gay man, if he enjoys having sex with men.“I mean it must feel kinda good otherwise you wouldn’t keep doing it, right? Does it feel good?” Mark asks.“Do you wanna find out?” an equally drunk Armond asks.Mark takes a raincheck before ambushing his wife Nicole (Connie Britton) in their bed, bashing his chest and making monkey noises in a nod to his monkey monologue.“You’re not taking this well are you?” Nicole says with a straight face.Someone else who isn’t taking something well is Mark’s daughter, Olivia (Sydney Sweeney), who discovers her best friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady) has been sneaking off for rendezvous’ with a hotel bus boy.The episode closes as an in-shock Olivia watches them have sex.New episodes of The White Lotus air on Foxtel at 11am on Mondays
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